In the mid-1990s, Yang Lina (杨荔纳, b. 1972), a young dancer in the China Central PLA Spoken Drama Troupe, moved from a military compound near Wanshousi (万寿寺), near today's West Third Ring, to an ordinary residential area of Beijing called Qingta (青塔). Her move was motivated by many reasons – to escape the suffocating atmosphere of the compound, to seek space for growth, to move more freely. Yet that move inadvertently ushered her into the emerging arena of Chinese independent cinema as her curiosity in a group of old men sitting on the neighbourhood's sidewalks led her to a project that would help precipitate the DV turn in the New Documentary Movement. This chapter highlights main threads in Yang's career as an independent film-maker that interweave the private and the public, the personal and the political, and documentary realism and cinematic spectrality, while exploring how these dichotomies are complexly articulated in Yang's films about marginalized inhabitants of Beijing at a time when this ‘Third World’ socialist capital city was being transformed into a neo-liberal global city. Spanning more than two decades, the multiplyawarded Old Men (老头, 1999), The Loves of Lao An (老安, 2008, hereafter, Lao An), and her narrative debut Longing for the Rain (春梦, 2013, hereafter, Longing) are significant milestones in Yang's career as well as Chinese independent cinema, and serve as a cinematic archive of the physical and psychic transformations of the capital city.